Chapter 131: Sinbound Employment – Mod
The crew took their break on the next building while the bellows still operated mechanically. The workers had left them running before they clocked out, and now the furnace followed that rhythm on its own.
Each compression pushed the flame higher. Each gap let it dip again. The pattern repeated exactly as it always had.
Mod walked to the furnace intake without asking for instructions.
She stopped at the mouth of the air channel near the furnace base and studied it from up close for a moment. She approached problems that way, with no visible emotion and quietly evaluating while she checked possibilities before committing to one.
Then she acted.
Silver started to glow from the furnace.
It formed at the intake as a narrow rim of pale light, sharp and cold against the orange furnace glow. The light carried no heat at all.
The rim widened in less than a second as the zone established itself, silver-white and bright, and the air near its edge distorted visibly. It bent inward, as though the space inside the boundary had compressed and was trying to pull the surrounding air after it.
The furnace reacted immediately.
The orange flame at the opening jerked toward the silver glow hard enough to twist sideways. White formed near the base where the strain intensified.
The roar climbed into a higher pitch, and the fire snapped violently as the zone pulled more air than the intake channel could supply. Instead of feeding from the channel alone, it started dragging from the furnace interior itself, pulling the flame outside the furnace.
The silver rim had already widened to nearly a hand-span, bright enough now to spill light across the floorboards.
Mab stepped backward before she consciously decided to.
"Mo-Mod?!" she cried out.
Across the section, Aestrith had stopped her work.
She still held the bore component over the workbench, but the tension in her posture had changed the instant the zone formed.
Through her awareness she had felt the imbalance immediately. Mod’s power was too strong and unevenly distributed.
She looked toward Beorn instead of speaking. The message carried in the glance alone.
He understood it at once.
"Ease back," Beorn told Mod. "You’re pulling harder than the channel can support it."
Mod weakened the ability.
The silver ring contracted toward the intake. Its brightness dimmed with it, and the flame stopped cracking and snapping outside the furnace.
But the problem wasn’t fully solved.
One side of the ring still burned brighter than the other. The left side of the intake was drawing more strongly than the right, and the flame leaned visibly toward the imbalance.
"I need you to distribute your power." Beorn instructed.
He kept his attention on the fire instead of on Mod herself.
"Balance it out."
She adjusted again.
This time the ring stabilized. The bright section faded until the silver became a thin, even line around the furnace intake, barely wider than a finger.
You could miss it entirely if you stood too far away.
The furnace changed immediately.
The flame did not surge upward.
It did not dip.
It held perfectly steady.
The center burned white-hot and constant in a way the bellows had never achieved.
The roar maintained the volume through the gap where the pressure should have dropped. Then through the next compression. Then through the following gap after that.
The bellows continued pointlessly beneath it, but the flame no longer cared whether they moved or not.
"Look away from it," Beorn told Mod.
She turned her head toward the wall on her left.
The silver ring remained stable. The flame remained stable.
"Keep looking away," he said. "Count to ten."
She counted silently.
The white-centered flame stayed constant through the entire count.
Beorn wrote in the ledger beside him.
"How much concentration is that taking?"
Still facing the wall, Mod answered, "About the same as walking."
He stopped for a second, and then wrote that down too.
"Good. That should mean you are capable of holding it for a long period of time."
He shut the ledger.
"You can release it."
She let the zone collapse.
The silver vanished instantly. The furnace dropped straight back into the bellows rhythm, surging and fading in uneven pulses again.
After nearly a minute of steady fire, the inconsistency felt obvious enough that anyone in the room could hear the difference.
Beorn watched the furnace a moment longer before turning toward Mab.
She was still watching the fire with a focused look.
"So Mod just... makes a hole in the furnace," she said slowly, "and the air moves toward the hole."
"That’s... a way to explain it," Beorn nodded.
"And all she has to do is keep the hole from shifting."
"Correct again."
Mab considered the explanation carefully, then nodded once after fitting it into place mentally.
"Okay."
Beorn moved around until the furnace sat behind him and Mab faced both him and the fire together.
"Your task works differently," he said. "For you, the flame isn’t the important part. The fuel is."
He pointed toward the furnace base where the coal and carbon sat packed together. "There’s more heat stored in that material than the furnace actually uses. Most of it never becomes flame, it stays trapped in the coal."
Mab frowned slightly. She was following the logic.
"You can change that," he explained. "You can force more of it to come out."
Her expression shifted immediately. Confusion gave way to active thought. Her eyes flicked toward Mod, then back to the furnace while she searched for a comparison that made sense.
"So..."
She said carefully, testing the idea while she spoke, "It’s kind of like how Beadu gets starving after training because she burns through more energy? And if you made the fire use more too, then it’d..."
She hesitated, checking whether the connection still held.
"The coal would burn harder?"
Beorn considered the explanation.
He could correct every inaccurate part of it, but that would take longer than redirecting her toward the principle underneath.
"The coal isn’t hungry," he explained. "But the idea of more coming out is right."
He crouched slightly so both of them viewed the furnace at the same level. "You’ve warmed objects before. The stone, for example. You hold it and it becomes warm because you’re making the stone release what was already inside it."
She blinked once.
"Yes?"
Beorn nodded, "The coal works like that. Heat already exists inside it, but normally only part of that is capable to leave. You force more of it outward."
He straightened again and motioned lightly with one hand. "Think of a soaked cloth. Twisting it harder doesn’t create more water, it just forces more of the water out."
Mab fell quiet.
Her eyes stopped on the fuel chamber while the comparison firmed itself in her mind.
Then understanding clicked into place visibly across her face.
"Oh," she said.
A second later, more firmly.
"Oh. I think I get it now. I don’t heat it myself, I make it let go."
"Exactly."
"And if I make it let go faster, the flame gets hotter."
"And the iron in the molds keeps a more even and higher temperature." Beorn added.
He watched her carefully.
"So I just don’t stop," she tilted her head.
"With the iron, yes."
He nodded once.
"But start small. Work on the fuel first. Just enough to test the response."
He pointed toward the furnace.
"Watch the flame carefully. That’s how you’ll know whether it’s working."
"And what if I push too hard?"
"Then you’ll get something like Mod’s first attempt," he shrugged, as if it wasn’t a problem.
Mab looked back at the furnace.
Then at Mod, who still stood near the furnace watching the conversation with a flat, attentive expression.
"Don’t blow it up," Mod said to nobody in particular, walking further away from the fire.
"I won’t," Mab snickered.
She faced the furnace again and planted her feet carefully.
"Okay," she resolved herself. "I’m ready."
