I was able to work with Shasta some more on my dwarvish nguage skills iime while I waited for the various partits to arrive. Then, iime when I didn't have any dwarvish to practice, I worked oh I had brought along. The partits started arriving a little earlier than st year, but I still had enough time to finish all the math I wao do. U year where the partits all arrived on their own ships, quite a few of the ships that arrived had multiple groups on them.

  I asked Shasta how that worked, sidering the warlords aren't supposed to meet until the opening ba, and I was told that the groups who arrived on the same ships were prised of representative delegates only, with no warlords present. Apparently, part of the reason Goppok Kanaga took so long to verify he was arriving st year was due to difficulties with seg a boat to transport him, since his territory is entirely ndlocked. To get around this issue, it seems like more than a few of the ndlocked warlords are just sending delegates, and w with their neighbors to share a ship.

  Ultimately, a total of 23 partits arrived, and this time, we weren't waiting for anyone. Only nine warlords actually arrived themselves, but sihe terms for the au were already pretty well established, that shouldn't be an issue. It did, however, make the ba feel a little more awkward due to the ratio of warlords to representatives. Other than that though, it was fairly lively.

  What wasn't lively though, was the au itself. Due to the sheer number of partits, the au ran for five days before ing to it's clusion. Though I shouldn't actually pin about it, since we made a lot of money from the whole exge. Last time, the au yielded about 32 times our normal trade budget. This time, it was just over 77 times our budget, more than double the st au. Though, after we factor in Kao's 5%, it's only about 73 times.

  That said, the closing ba was lively, a everything sorted out pretty quickly, and within two days, everyone, ourselves included, had left Kao's isnd. Which means we now have at least 3 dwarven warlords who are tracted to help protect us if we're targeted again iure for some reason. This year's au winner is quite close geographically to the previous one. It makes me wonder if seeing the success of the previous crystal in helping an eade the nearby warlords more willing to pay a rger sum of money for a crystal of their own.

  I'll have to spend some time this year thinking about more expensive imports that we might want for our try. I really don't think it's that wise to just sit on money, when it could be doing work for us instead. Perhaps I should sider looking into the idea of hiring skilled borers? If there are guilds of some kind who deal in different types of bor, we could potentially rent some bor out for a year to do some form of work for us.

  I arrived ba our isnd owenty-sed day of the twelfth month of the year. With only a little over a month left until spring, I wao start the mining team on their unnel immediately. So, after getting things measured out and lined up, I did just that. It took a few days to make sure we had everything as lined up and leveled as we could, but after that, the mining crew got to work cutting the unnel.

  Due to the precision that I'm having the tunnel dug to, they do work a bit slower than normal, but other than that, they do seem to be managing the requirements for the tunnel quite well. While they slowly cut into the mountain, I worked on building a temporary bathhouse just outside the tunrance, so that e springtime, we'd have a good location to move the seaside crystal.

  During the spring, the stru team that is normally cutting stone from the new artificial tide pool instead cut stone from the tuo widen it to it's final size. As long as the smaller guide tunnel is accurate, small deviations in the rger tunnel shouldn't cause any issues.

  As spring arrived, aransitioned stru locations to the uhings seemed to work pretty well. The amount of stone being removed from the tunnel was more than enough for stru iy, and the wider tunnel was being dug at a faster pace than the small tunnel, probably due to having less strict requirements for stru, and having an easier time actually moving the stoh the extra space.

  Sihat project seems to be w well on it's own, I took a few days to have the information about all the posts around the road copied into the city's archive. As long as we don't have any major ndslides or earthquakes, we should be able to use any of those posts as starting points for future calcutions if they're needed.

  After that, I finally had time to start on my own projects again, starting with the pyrite. We did get another crystal sample from the mert this year, but that project wait a little longer, since we currently are sitting on a detly rge amount of pyrite which I'd like to turn into quality iron.

  The issue with the first iron batch was how brittle it was. I 't say for certain what all issues it had, but one is probably residual sulfur, and another is likely inaals. Though some of the metals, like zind lead, probably evaporated due to the high heat necessary to melt iron, so it's probably only a few metals, such as copper, left.

  I previously discussed that I could try two things, either try to work with the roasted pyrite directly to make quality iron, or use the already smelted brittle iron, and refi again. Of the two, I think it'd be easiest to work with the brittle iron, mostly because it already has some of the impurities removed. It might waste some work and materials to do it that way, but it's also the most likely to get good results.

  Ultimately, I have three things I'm going to try. I'll do eadividually, then attempt te certaiogether. First, I'll try adding a lot of extra carbon to the mix, a it for a long time, with the hopes that the excess carbon will remove some of the remaining sulfur impurities, in a simir rea to how it removes oxygen impurities.

  The sed addition is another round of lime being added in as flux, to hopefully preferentially remove some of the other metal impurities from the iron. The third test involves adding soda ash in, to potentially capture some impurities that the lime wouldn't. I expect that each process will remove some of the impurities, but I'm not sure if they'll i with each atively or not, so I'll have to try them indepely first.

  I took fourteen days doiing, and came up with a reasonable process for refining the iron from the pyrite. The final quality of the product is still somewhat low, but it's at least funal, and should be useful for a lot of different produ purposes. The final process modifies the first smelting step for the roasted pyrite, and thehrough a sed stage.

  Wheing out additional carbon, I found that it improved the quality of the iron somewhat, but it had certain properties that we didn't want. However, a seelt of that iron would reduce those properties a bit. So, after testing with that, I found that we could get simir results by adding signifitly more carbon into the first stage melt of the roasted pyrite.

  Then, the sed step involves adding a mixture of lime and soda ash to the iron as it's melted again. The sg that the mixture forms seems to be removing a few different impurities, and improved the quality of the iron further, though it does seem like there are still a few impurities that we're having trouble removing. Ultimately, the most expensive part of the process is actually the soda ash, since our best source of that is the float vines.

  However, unlike previously, where we were somewhat limited in where we could harvest them, we now have the salvage boat, so in theory, we harvest them from around the isnd much easier than before, if the need arises. The float vines only seem to take a few years to reach maturity, so as long as we're not pletely clear cutting them, robably harvest quite a few of them annually without much issue.

  By my calcutions, we'll need about oure float vio refine one pound of iron, which means we need many thousands of vio process our current stockpile of pyrite. Which means it'll probably have to take pce over a few years time.