The Crafter's Darkness: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 4) by Jonathan Brooks (e book reading free txt) 📕

that wasn’t as important to her.  Though she had made dozens of them by that point, they were still unique enough to scratch her crafting itch…at least for a little while.  After crafting more normal bolts and explosive bolts for them, she moved on to something else.

One of the crafting stations that she had initially built but never really utilized was her Furnace and Kiln room, designed for working clay or glass.  Now that she had managed to unlock Quartz Sand, she decided to see what she could make with glass!  There were hundreds of different things she could make using the versatile material, but first she had to make sure she could actually create it in the first place.

She diverted some of her Mana to create a thin-walled open-topped bowl with a pour spout of Dragon Glass – which was more stone than glass – and then filled it with Quartz Sand.  Once that was full, she used one of her Apes she used for crafting to place it in the furnace and turned it on – to the highest heat it could reach.  If she remembered correctly, the crafters she had learned from back when she was Human added some other elements to the sand (such as limestone and ash) that helped to reduce the temperature needed to melt the sand into glass; they did this because achieving such high temperatures was sometimes difficult, and it made working the material easier when taking it out of the furnace.

Luckily, Sandra didn’t have to worry about either of those things.  For one, creating such high temperatures was quite easy for her to achieve, and her constructs were a bit more resistant to the high heats associated with the production.  It still got hot enough that even her Steelclad Ape Warrior would melt if it stayed near the furnace for too long, but she also had the Dragon Glass gloves she had previously crafted to help with that.  Working the liquid glass wouldn’t be too much problem, either, as the ambient heat given off by the material itself was barely noticeable to her construct.  Of course, if her Ape were to stick its hand into the hot glass that probably wouldn’t be good, but she wasn’t planning on touching it directly.

What she did need to start with were some molds in which to place the hot glass so that it could cool and form into different shapes.  That was the most basic way to craft certain items, which was what she was going to start with before she moved onto blowing, rolling, and shaping it to create more delicate pieces, including what could be theoretically called works of art.  Having never actually worked with glass before, however, she thought it was best to begin with something much easier, which was why she started to design a few molds made out of clay, which she then fired in the kiln to harden them into what she needed.

So, while the sand melted into its liquid glass form – which was going to take at least an hour, possibly more – she brought in an Unstable Shapeshifter with its more delicate fingers and used clay to form different molds.  The first was a simple square box 1 foot on each side and 2 inches deep that she could use to make a pane of glass, the easiest and most basic form of glass she could create.

Next, using some simple stone tools to carve it out, she created a mold that she could use for a simple four-sided cup; all she had to do was carve out smooth channels where the glass would flow in a block of clay, leaving the middle of it alone (creating the center of the cup) and leaving space for the bottom to form.  Last, she created a two-sided mold that was carved out in the shape of a ridged plate, which she sealed up, leaving just enough space on the top to pour the liquid glass into.  There were a few other basic shapes that she experimented with, including a large solid sphere, some star-shaped designs that were easy enough to carve out, and finally a block of solid glass that she thought might look neat.

Now, Sandra could’ve just made some of the more basic molds out of stone, used them to pour the glass into, and then absorbed the stone to reveal the final product; she didn’t want to do that, however, because the simple act of crafting the molds by hand was what she was she was looking for.  There were many things that she had found lately that she could actually craft using her Mundane Object Creation skill, and she had taken advantage of that liberally when she had been in a rush or a time crunch, but nothing beat making it herself with her own hands – even if they were hands borrowed from one of her Dungeon Monsters.

She fired the molds in the kiln, which eliminated the moisture within the clay, hardened the forms, and got them ready to use for the glass.  Normally, the process of firing them could take days of lower heat to prevent them from exploding from the release of so much moisture, but Sandra had used her Mana to remove most of the moisture before they ever went inside the kiln.  Was it cheating?  Yes, but she also didn’t want to wait days to use the molds and it didn’t really affect the crafting process she was enjoying.

After nearly two hours of intense heat inside of the furnace, the entire quantity of Quartz Sand inside of the bowl had melted into a bright-red slurry of molten glass.  She immediately turned off the heat with her Ape and then reached inside the now-cool furnace – it was amazing how the Dragon Glass that lined the furnace didn’t retain heat – to grab the bowl.  Then, bringing it to the molds that