CHAPTER 135: CHAPTER 135: THE SURPLUS

"No, Your Majesty. Not the furnace this time." Audrey’s smile deepened just slightly, her eyes glinting as if amused by his surprise. "Today, I wished to speak of the surplus in steel production... and the growing stockpiles of pig iron."

Arthur raised a brow, his expression sharpening with curiosity.

"A surplus?" he asked, leaning forward a little. "What do you mean by that? I hadn’t expected steel—and pig iron, no less—to reach surplus levels this soon."

Audrey inclined her head, her tone calm yet laced with quiet pride. "It is exactly as I’ve said, Your Majesty. We are producing more than we currently consume. Since the completion of two new blast furnaces here in Eldoria, and combined with the existing output of Iron Hearth, our production capacity has nearly doubled. Before, we were transporting solid pig iron from Iron Hearth to feed the mills, but now, Eldoria alone produces enough to meet demand... and still leaves us with excess."

Arthur’s fingers tapped lightly against the desk, a steady rhythm that betrayed the depth of his thoughts. He had expected steady growth, yes—but not such rapid abundance. His lips curved into a faint line as he muttered, half to himself, "So our bottleneck has shifted. From scarcity... to oversupply."

"Precisely," Audrey replied, her voice soft but sure. Her eyes lingered on his hands, watching the way he tapped the polished wood while thinking. She found herself caught by those small habits of his—subtle gestures others would dismiss, yet to her, they revealed more of the man than any crown or title ever could.

"Warehouses in Eldoria are already filling," she continued. "Since production grew, it became easier to supply smiths with iron and steel, and yes—we’ve forged weapons in bulk to absorb the flow. But even then, the stockpiles continue to rise. There is still a great surplus."

Arthur fell silent. In a medieval world where kingdoms bled each other for scraps of iron, the word surplus was almost absurd. Having too much steel was not a curse but a blessing—yet a blessing that, if left unmanaged, could rot into waste.

Should I hire more blacksmiths? he thought. No... labor takes time to train, and even then, they could never match the speed of the furnaces. Not enough to keep pace.

He leaned back, his amber gaze turning distant and thoughtful. "Steel in surplus..." he echoed. His voice was calm, but the weight of calculation pressed behind it. "It is a good problem to have. Better than hunger. Better than scarcity. But a problem nonetheless."

Audrey tilted her head slightly, watching him think aloud, her lips curving in quiet admiration.

Arthur continued, his tone steady, precise. "Steel left unused is wasted wealth. We will continue weapon development, yes, and use what we can for expansion—infrastructure, civil works, new projects. But for the excess pig iron..." His eyes narrowed, glinting with resolve. "...we’ll sell it on the market as solid pig iron. Let other lords pay us for what they lack. Better to turn surplus into coins than let it rust in storage."

Audrey smiled faintly, her chin resting against her hand once more. "And just like that," she murmured, "you’ve turned what others would see as a burden into opportunity."

Arthur didn’t catch the warmth in her tone. To him, it was a simple observation. To her, it was proof of why she sought him out—not only as a king, but as a man whose mind never ceased shaping the future.

Audrey’s eyes lingered on him, then she tilted her head slightly, her tone curious but also playful.

"Then tell me, Your Majesty—how much should pig iron even sell for in the market? You say we’ll turn it into coin, but..." She let a small laugh escape her lips. "...how does one sell something the markets have never even heard of?"

Arthur paused, his fingers steepling. She wasn’t wrong. To most smiths and merchants, the very word pig iron meant nothing. They only knew the metals that passed through their forges: wrought iron and steel.

Before Arthur had invented the blast furnace into this world, the making of steel was slow, laborious, and entirely dependent on the smith’s skill. Everything began with ore dug from the earth—dirty, uneven stones that held only a fraction of usable iron within them. These were fed into bloomeries: crude clay or stone furnaces no taller than a man, fueled with charcoal and bellows that had to be worked by hand.

What came out of such furnaces was a bloom—a spongy, half-solid mass of iron riddled with slag and impurities. It was not yet metal fit for use. To refine it, the smith had to heat it until it glowed red and then hammer it endlessly on the anvil, beating the slag out piece by piece. Hours of sweat, strength, and patience produced wrought iron: tough and malleable, good for nails, farm tools, or simple armor.

But wrought iron alone was soft. A blade forged of it would bend on the battlefield, a lance would snap, armor would dent beneath a single heavy blow. To make steel required an even more painstaking craft. Smiths had to take bars of wrought iron and pack them in charcoal, sealing them in clay boxes, then heating them for days—sometimes weeks—so that a trickle of carbon seeped into the surface. The result was only a thin outer layer of steel, which had to be folded, hammered, and reforged back into the core again and again.

It was a process that demanded both skill and time. Every sword, spear, or suit of steel armor that emerged from such labor was a treasure, the pride of its maker. Fine steel was so rare that kingdoms measured their strength not in coin or grain alone, but in the number of blades their masters could produce in a year. Wars were won or lost not by will or courage, but by the simple scarcity of weapons.

This was the world Arthur had inherited. A world where steel was precious, limited, and chained to tradition.

And now, with the blast furnace, all of that had changed.

Pig iron poured from the furnaces like molten rivers, cast into ingots faster than bloomeries could ever dream of. Though brittle in its raw form, it was the foundation for steel and wrought iron in far greater quantities than any kingdom had ever possessed. What had once been rare could now be made abundant. What had once taken months could now be forged in weeks.

And no one else—not the smiths of Iron Hearth, nor the nobles of distant kingdoms—truly understood what pig iron was. To them, it was nothing more than strange, brittle metal, too fragile for weapons and too crude for tools, a curiosity with no place in the market stalls.

But to Arthur, it was different. To him, pig iron was not weakness—it was potential. It was the seed of steel, the foundation of weapons, bridges, rails, and towers yet to be built. In those crude ingots, he saw not useless stone, but the bones of an empire.

Potential alone meant nothing if no one recognized its worth. If the world could not grasp the value of pig iron, then Arthur would make them understand—or deceive them if he must. His task was larger than forging steel; he had to forge belief, to shape markets as surely as he shaped furnaces. Ignorance would become opportunity, and doubt would turn into demand. Now was the moment to unleash the arsenal of twenty-first-century strategy and cunning.