Let go of that monster girl!

He looked at Lyme and asked.

"Lyme, do you remember what the foremen were called at the previous foreman meeting?"

Lem nodded, then shook his head, a small voice coming from under his bangs.

"It seems to be all ores."

Molen laughed.

"It is a custom of the mouse girls to name their daughters after things around them."

"Therefore, a village in an agricultural area may have a hundred hyacinths, and a mining area may have a hundred verdigris."

A family of leatherworkers, alum, and ore.

The ant girl had previously captured all his attention; otherwise, he should have realized it sooner.

Moren walked over to the pile of spoils that had just been unloaded from the airship and tore open a sack that had just been seized from the Dessert Hill mine.

It was filled with clear white crystals, which refracted tiny lights under the fluorite lantern.

This is truly an unexpected delight.

What a wonderful surprise!

Alum has many well-known uses, including tanning leather and frying dough sticks.

But it has a true identity that was far from being discovered in this ignorant Middle Ages:

Potassium aluminum sulfate dodecahydrate.

铝！

In other words, mithril!

Mithril is priced at more than five times that of gold!

Molen held the alum crystal in his hand above his head, his lips curving into a wide, uncontrollable grin:

"Lem, you may not believe it, but I hold in my hands a power powerful enough to shake the entire world!"

Chapter 57 Ice Crystal Stone

It's time to open Morren's Magic House and find some magical gadgets.

Moren led Lyme Sulfur and the Rat Girls down the spiral stone staircase of the Baron's Castle and pushed open the creaking, heavy wooden door to the basement.

As soon as the door opened, the rat girls filed in.

The basement was filled with all sorts of wooden crates and sacks, and the dust made the mouse girls sneeze.

Moren directed the rat girls to take action.

"Move them all out, bring them all into the yard to get some fresh air."

The mouse girls hurriedly carried out all sorts of strange things piled up together, including rusty iron frames and baskets full of torn paper scraps.

Several female mice worked together to drag a large box, but they were too short and made a loud clattering sound as they bumped against the steps.

*Splat*

A black, rod-shaped object, about the thickness of an arm, slid out of the half-open box and rolled onto the ground.

Lyme followed behind the group, carrying several pamphlets with leather covers. He bent down and picked up the stick as he went.

But whether it was her magic that activated some hidden runes, the entire device began to writhe like a stubborn fish.

Startled, Lyme stretched out his little hand as far as he could to get away from it.

"Ugh, boss, I never thought you'd made something like this." Sulfur stood to the side, holding a clay pot, his face full of disgust.

Molen reached out and grabbed Sulfur's round ears, rubbing them twice.

"The little rascal knows quite a lot."

Then he took the black, stick-like object that was constantly chrysanthemum-like from Lyme's hand. Once it was in his hand, the thing immediately quieted down and remained motionless.

"Pfft." The cook, with a copper pot balanced on her head, walked out from the depths of the basement. She saw the thing in Moren's hand and laughed.

"The young master had a mining machine custom-made by a runesmith when he was a child, but without a magic supply, it couldn't even poke the stone."

"However, massaging the waist and relaxing the shoulders and neck is quite effective."

Molen's lips twitched.

This is practically his early dark history.

Although it's an early embarrassing story, it actually cost young Master Morren quite a bit of his allowance to carve those runes.

The earliest version featured a drill bit on its head, imitating a pile driver that spews steam from the rear.

But once it was actually built, it was embarrassingly discovered that, let alone breaking through the sky, it was basically immobile without a supply of magic power, and could only be used as a blunt weapon to knock things.

Neither Morren nor the Rat Girl possessed any magical talent, and this world lacked useful magical storage items such as magic stones and magic jars.

Relying solely on the meager supply of natural magic, they could only slowly molt, completely wasting the five-speed transmission function that Moren had meticulously designed.

However, retaining only the power component makes it surprisingly effective at relaxing tense muscles.

It effectively relieves lumbar muscle strain and has an excellent stress-relieving effect. Mo Lun earned his first pot of gold with this.

Some dragon girls even asked people to buy this, and Moren didn't know what they wanted to do with it.

It's probably used for decompression.

In the courtyard, the mouse girls kept taking out all sorts of strange inventions that Morren had made in the past from the boxes, chattering as they held them up and showed them to each other.

A hand-cranked mixer.

A bundle of springs and belts tangled together.

Several mouse girls worked together to lift out a huge concave bronze mirror, which was particularly dazzling under the fluorite light.

A mouse girl rummaged through the bottom of the box and pulled out several dried, shriveled plant tubers, holding them in her hands to examine them closely.

Molen turned his head and saw it, walked over and picked one up, weighing it in his hand.

He turned to Lyme and held up the shriveled tuber for her to see.

"This is a potato. It's not mentioned in the church's scriptures, so they don't allow it to be planted."

"I saved a few seeds back then, but they've been stored for too long, and now they probably won't survive."

He waved his hand to indicate that they should be thrown away, but the rat girls stuffed the dried potatoes into their mouths and started chewing them.

Then their little faces scrunched up, reluctant to spit out the crumbs in their mouths, and they looked at each other with muffled expressions.

Well, anyway, rat girls aren't prone to food poisoning.

Then another mouse girl dragged out a large bag of yellow cubes wrapped in oil paper from another box.

"This is soap. It didn't take much effort to make it, but I found out it had already been invented a long time ago. I didn't expect there to be so much left."

The mouse girls looked up at Morren with expectant expressions.

Molen picked up the short stick from his shoulder and poked them one by one in the lower abdomen.

"Don't keep it for yourself, take it to the hot water room to use together."

"Great!"

Another mouse girl carefully emerged, carrying two sealed earthenware jars, the rims of which were covered with long, grayish-green fur.

Uh, Morren recognized her.

These are penicillin and salicylic acid that he tried to make before, but they weren't very successful.

Drinking it will probably test the rat girl's ability to resist poison.

Penicillin requires the cultivation of high-yield strains, and salicylic acid requires acylation treatment. Both of these are technologies from the "Zenith" era, and under these conditions, they are completely unmanageable.

Molen did try the classic allicin approach, but found that garlic didn't grow near the hills, so he forgot about it.

"Let it fall over."

The mouse girl carried two jars of hairy liquid to the corner to deal with it.

"Found it, Your Excellency!"

A female mouse dragged a heavy sack out from the depths of the basement, placed the sack at Moren's feet as if to show off, and tore open the sack with her little hands.

Inside was a whole bag of snow-white, tiny granules.

cryolite.

Ice crystal is a natural mineral. Although the name sounds high-end, it may even make people wonder if it contains ice-attribute magic.

But like the name of snowflake steak, it's just a name based on appearance, and it doesn't have any anti-icing properties.

Ice crystals are relatively rare, but not exceptional. They are expensive for the price of the stone itself, but this large sack only cost five silver coins back then.

The reserves of this mineral in the Rat Girl Kingdom are neither large nor small, and the only reason it is hard to buy on the market is that it is of little use.

Some alchemical apprentices mistakenly expect it to have some symbolic attribute, and unsurprisingly end up burning a pot of slag.

Whether it's useful or not depends on whether it's in the right hands.

Aluminum was not a metal in the Middle Ages because elemental aluminum was too unstable, while aluminum compounds were too stable.

Aluminum has a melting point of only 600 degrees Celsius, while aluminum oxide has a melting point as high as 2000 degrees Celsius.

It didn't melt even when the furnace was set on fire; it's completely impervious to acids and alkalis and invincible to water and fire.

However, by using molten cryolite as a solvent, its melting point can be lowered to 900 degrees Celsius, which is lower than that of copper.

If one does not know this top-secret formula known only to Moren, how can one still attempt to refine this rare metal?

That would require relying on witches or monster girls with extremely strong metal control.

Such powerful individuals are few and far between across the entire continent, and they are unlikely to be willing to help you refine mithril in your blacksmith shop.

Mithril, oh, wonderful mithril.

Molen reached into the sack and grabbed something.

Who would have thought it could be extracted from such an ordinary mineral?

Chapter 58 Mithril

Wolfsburg.

Jimmy lay on the hotel bed, his bare feet swinging back and forth.

Sway left, sway right, sway left, sway right.

The cat's tail was tucked between its two legs, swaying back and forth in time with the beat.

The hotel room was large and filled with beds. Several berths around her were occupied by the caravan's catgirl companions, their purring filling the room.

The catgirl closest to her was hugging a pillow and muttering something incoherently.

"Fish, big fish meow... don't run away..."

Jimmy kicked his little feet, and the cat rolled over onto his back, stretching out his little paws to hold a silver coin above his head.

The fluorite lantern outside the window shone through the gap in the curtains, illuminating the coin perfectly.

These are the mithril coins that the wolf mother gave her.

The silver-white coin is polished to an extremely fine finish, with the Alchemist Guild emblem cast on the obverse. Two crossed hammers are placed under a rat's head, with every line clearly visible.

The side has a neat ring of anti-file serrations.

Simply holding it in your hand, it's easy to notice that it's much larger than a gold coin, but at the same time, it's also easy to notice that it's much lighter than a gold coin.

Mithril has a density that is only one-third that of iron and one-seventh that of gold.

Light as a feather, tough as steel, white as silver, and immortal for a thousand years.

It's simply the perfect carrier for runes.

Each Mithril Coin contains 3.5 grams of Mithril and can be exchanged for three Gold Coins.

Because of their high face value and precious materials, Mithril coins are not official circulating currency, but rather serve as a transaction certificate between nobles and the alchemy market.