Andrew hovered his hand over the ingot feeling for heat, there was nothing. He lowered his hand until he was touching the ingot, which was only slightly warm. He set the ingot down on the nearby anvil for later testing, then dug into the nearby wooden box and started loading the crucible up with the next layer of testing materials. It was much easier to break the wood scraps up into smaller pieces as they had a tendency to break along the grain, revealing layers of silvery material on the inside. Once the crucible was full he popped it into the forge and took a step back. More smoke poured out, but it was quite a bit less offensive than the thick black smoke produced by the fresh green material. He left it to cook while headed over to the anvil to take a closer look at the ingot.

The first thing he did was activate Mana Sense. The ingot was predictably filled with bright silvery metal mana, and it was constantly swirling and mixing in with about a quarter as much fire mana. What stood out the most to Andrew was that those were the only two mana types within the ingot. Normal ingots typically had a mix of small pockets of other mana types within them, mostly earth, but a tiny bit of air and water as well. This ingot was a pure mix of fire and metal, and the two seemed to shift and mix together naturally, rather than remaining in isolated pockets. Andrew grabbed a piece of scrap metal in one hand, the ingot in the other, then activated Siphon Affinity. His mana flooded into the ingot, but he didn't try to grasp ahold of the affinities within, he just poked around to see what was available. The ingot had significantly more metal mana affinity than fire affinity, which was expected. What he didn't expect was the sheer density of each affinity. It had nearly five times as much natural affinity as a typical ingot forged from ore in the mana furnace.

Quite a bit more time consuming, but a superior product overall. I would have to drain the metal and fire affinities from four standard ingots to get an equivalently dense amount to this single ingot. This might actually be quicker overall, despite the additional forging time.

Andrew set the ingot down and leaned back to practice more mana projection while he waited for the wood scraps to burn off and melt. The sun was starting to set, but he planned on staying up late tonight messing around with the different materials. Having something to work on helped him think. The incident this morning revealed a potential threat to George's power over the people of New Eden, and he wasn't sure what he wanted to do with that information. He couldn't be sure it was even a real threat, maybe the people of New Eden already knew and had no problem with it at all. That would be the best case scenario, even if it did negate a potential threat to George's power, but there was a reason they were keeping it hidden. He could still clearly picture the panicked recoil of Jack when he realized Andrew was in the room, and George even apologized to him. Was that an attempt to get back into Andrew's good graces after what he witnessed? Or was it a change of heart due to genuine gratitude for helping Jack?

The smoke from the forge was thinning out, so Andrew headed over and peeked in, seeing that a black crust had formed over the top of the crucible. He crystalized a new ladle and scooped out the blackened bits, which were more clumpy ash than fractured stones this time. The bottom of the crucible had a tiny sliver of silvery red material on the bottom, almost everything else was burnt to ashes. Andrew poured it into an ingot mold and there wasn't enough to cover even half the bottom of the ingot mold. Andrew refilled the crucible again, stuffing it tight with wood scraps, then headed off towards the wagons. He was going to need more forges running if the yields were going to be this low.

The crucible was done melting by the time he finished setting up the second forge, and he poured it out into the same mold before packing both crucibles full and heading out to get a third forge set up nearby. They had four in total, and no one else would be using them any time soon. When every bit of wood scrap he had infused was melted down he had about a third of the ingot mold filled with silvery red material. It looked pretty much identical to the liquid metal produced by the bush, right down to it's relatively low heat output and consistent liquid state. Andrew took the mold a little ways from the mana forges before activating his Mana Sense skill, peering down into the liquid metal. The mix looked very similar to the solid ingot, though it had a one to one ratio of metal and fire mana within instead of the four to one ratio of the solid ingot. Andrew set it down in the half-scuffed fire dispersal circle, did some quick repairs, and set it running again. He moved on to the next experiment.

He had to break the silver flecked stones down in order to pack them into the crucible, so he spent a few minutes stacking rocks up on the anvil and breaking them down with swings of his hammer. It took significantly more force to drag the kinetic affinitied hammer through the air, but it crushed the rocks far more easily than he would've expected. When he had a pile of small enough pieces he filled each of the four crucibles up with the little chunks and put them into the forges. Then he sat back to practice more with Mana Projection. The forges released tiny streams of smoke at first, but it stopped within the first minute of them cooking. He paused his practice to peek inside, but the material was almost entirely unchanged at that point. After a few minutes he took another break to scuff out the fire dispersal circle again and pop out the thin ingot of silvery-pink metal. It was nearly identical to the other ingot, though there were slight differences in the ratio of fire to metal mana. Probably related to the amount of time it spent inside the fire dispersal circle. He checked on the crucibles again to find them slightly melted, but with small chunks of solid silvery material still floating through. It looked as though the natural stone of the rocks had melted before the silvery metallic bits, which meant it was very likely the resulting mix would be mostly stone upon cooling.

Andrew pulled each of the crucibles out of the forge and lined them up. He got out two empty ingot molds and created a crystalized mana ladle, scooping as much of the silvery material out into one ingot mold as he could. Then he poured the remaining molten contents of the crucible out into the other ingot mold. He then poured the silvery chunks back into the same crucible, and used the ladle to scoop the silvery chunks out of each of the other crucibles and into the one with only silvery chunks. He put that one back into the forge and poured the rest of the molten material out into the other ingot molds, filling two and a half in total. The melted material glowed a bright orange-red, and looked much more like typical melted rock so he set the ingot molds aside and waited to see if they would cool off normally as the silvery chunks continued to melt.