"Pah"

After absorbing the black mist, the dragon crystal turned black and purple and fell to the ground. Carl took a few steps back and did not dare to move forward.

The turbid black fog was swirling inside the dragon crystal, and it looked as if it would burst out at any time.

"What a weird thing!"

After a struggle in his heart, Carl gritted his teeth, took out his wrench, clamped the dragon crystal with the wrench, and threw it into the corner of the ceremony site.

"Let's blow this place down after we get out. I remember there seemed to be several materials in the warehouse that were raw materials for gunpowder."

After burying the dragon crystal with stones, Carl returned to the center of the ritual site and began to collect various materials scattered there.

The first to be hit was the fragment of the black stone greatsword that had once been possessed by the black fog.

"Why does this look so much like silver oxide? But can that thing be made into a great sword?"

Controlling the power armor to pick up a piece of the black stone sword, Carl was about to identify the specific material, but the fragment could not withstand the power of the power armor and shattered directly.

"No wonder my magic missile shattered it. Is it because it's so fragile? If I had known, I would have used a crossbow to attack it. I would have wasted a spell slot in vain."

After repeatedly confirming that there was no residual black mist or strange magic in the greatsword fragments, Carl took out a few small boxes from his dimensional bag and put the fragments in them.

Then, he turned his gaze towards the corpses of the earth elves around him that had long since turned into bones.

They were wearing metal armor, and although it was badly damaged, the sharp-eyed Carl immediately recognized that the armor was made of an alloy material mixed with mithril.

Carl was just worried about not having the materials to continue upgrading his power armor, but now this is a blessing in disguise, isn't it?

"Good stuff! All good stuff! This goblin tribe is really fat!"

There were only four sets of relatively intact metal armor, but Carl did not even let go of those rotten armors and put them all into the dimensional bag.

In a short while, the entire dimensional bag was filled.

Looking around, Carl made sure that he had not missed anything, then turned around and left the ceremony site to meet Hope who was waiting at the tunnel entrance.

"Hope! Go up there and bring down some charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur."

Seeing Carl return safely, Hope secretly breathed a sigh of relief.

But when she heard Karl wanted these things, she asked curiously, “What’s wrong?”

Opening the helmet of his power armor, Carl pointed to the depths of the tunnel with lingering fear.

"There is a weird thing inside, but it is now trapped in the dragon crystal. I plan to prepare some explosives and blow up the ritual site inside. This way, it should not be able to come out and harm people."

Nodding hesitantly, Hope turned and crawled out of the tunnel, and began to transport the things Carl needed from the top to the bottom.

Halfway through the transportation, Carl discovered that there were several barrels of prepared black powder.

However, due to its age and poor storage environment, the gunpowder has become damp.

But this also scared Carl into a cold sweat, and he quickly told Hope to handle it with care during transportation.

The back-and-forth moving work took the two of them nearly five hours.

After mixing all those messy things together and piling them into a small hill, Carl opened a bucket of relatively dry and prepared gunpowder and scattered it from the ceremony site to the exit of the tunnel.

Using a magic trick to light the fuse, Carl and Hope left the warehouse.

After waiting quietly for more than ten minutes, accompanied by a "rumbling" sound, the cliff on the right side of the goblin tribe collapsed slightly.

So Carl went back into the tunnel to check the situation inside.

When he saw that the end of the tunnel had been blocked by fallen rocks, Carl finally breathed a sigh of relief.

"Very good! Next, let's build a cart and transport all the useful things here back!"

There are still some Khyber Dragon Crystals left in the tunnels that have not collapsed, and there are also some metal equipment and ores in the armory.

For Carl and Hope, who lack various things, these things cannot be given up.

However, a round trip would take at least two people a day, and if they only relied on the dimensional bag, the efficiency would be a bit slow.

The two of them didn't know when the hobgoblins and bear goblins in the goblin tribe would come back, but to be on the safe side, they planned to fight quickly.

After using the wood from the goblin tribe to build a four-wheeled cart, Carl put on a rope on his power armor and returned to the mushroom forest with Hope and a cart of things.

…

“Ding! Ding! Ding!”

The day after returning from the goblin camp, Carl began to build furnaces and caves on the mushroom caps.

Carl used a lathe to cut the armor mixed with mithril, and operated the drill to carve runes representing fire on the metal plate.

Although no spirituality was infused into it, the temperature of the metal plate had risen visibly because it was engraved on the mithril material with the best magical conductivity.

"Aren't you going to find a place for the two of us to live first? The living room is a bit small now."

Standing next to Carl, Hope tried to convince Carl to go and handle the wood first.

During the time that Carl was resting, she went out to cut some wood so that she could live in a spacious room as soon as possible.

But Carl went off to tinker with new things again.

Recently, maybe it was a side effect of using the power of the giant, but Hope could clearly feel that her body was developing rapidly, which made her a little ashamed to live in the same room with Carl.

"Believe me, my work here will be finished soon, and then I will go to deal with the wood."

Carl cut three more metal plates from the mithril armor and carved fire runes on them one by one while comforting Hope.

In fact, he also vaguely realized what Hope cared about.

After all, it was getting firmer every day, and Carl couldn't help but pay attention.

The leather jackets made for Hope were a little loose before, but after these few days, Hope was able to hold them up perfectly.

"But the construction of the smelting furnace and the cave is urgent. Now that we know there are goblins here and we have encountered such a weird thing, arming ourselves must be the first priority!"

'Once these two facilities are built, I can process wood while I'm smelting and firing pottery.'

Smiling and brushing Hope off, Carl sighed slightly and continued to devote himself to the seemingly endless mechanical processing.

Soon, the four mithril alloy metal plates engraved with fire runes were all completed. Carl found some soil collected from the vicinity of the goblin tribe, mixed it with water into mud, and prepared to make mud bricks.

With those four metal plates, as long as Carl injects spirituality into them, they will emit a high temperature far exceeding that of ordinary rune stones.

In this way, Carl can build a blast furnace and smelt metal.

(End of this chapter)