The sound of metal hammering metal grew louder as I approached the smithy. The noise pollution—as well as the actual pollution, with all the smells and smoke that came from the charcoal kilns and the forge and bloomeries—had forced us to relocate to the edge of the village, up coast from where the bulk of the Sheowon lived. It was closer to the bogs, so it was actually an improvement in many ways.I set my turf shovel down, one of many we had made once we started getting the hang of forging the iron we had learned to extract from the bloodstone. Proper tooling helped a ton, though it had taken quite a lot of trial and error to reach that point.Peeking inside, I saw Ibriya directing an apprentice striker named Weomik as they worked on something on the anvil. They were too focused on their forging to notice me, but on the other side of the shop, Shappi glanced up from where she was grinding an edge on a masonry chisel. She gave me a quick grin and a wave before refocusing on her work.A smile came to my face, as it always did when I thought about how far we had come. I slipped back out, not wanting to interrupt them, and headed around back to where my little house lay so I could grab some food.After our initial success at refining bog iron, it wasn’t long before we could somewhat consistently produce additional blooms and process them down into relatively pure iron ingots. From there, it was a relatively small hop to usable tools, though it took a while before we got a proper process down and produce things of enough quality to really showcase the value of our work.Turf shovels were a hit, as the Sheowon village had to rely on their Blood to cut enough turf for all their cooking and heating needs. Stone was just not the right material for the job, and digging by hand without a shovel was far too inefficient—even with four hands per Sheowon. The sharpened metal shovel cut almost as clean as Blood, and though it was physically tiring, (...)