Chapter 625: The Mysterious Consultant (3)
“…Are you saying someone among my disciples secretly tampered with the furnace?”
Cyberd’s face stiffened, appalled as if he had heard a monstrous claim.
“Every one of these fellows gathered here, I personally selected and raised them. You could say they’re like my own children.”
“…”
“If you can’t back up that claim here today, you’ll have to personally apologize to the disciples of my workshop. Understand?”
“I understand. For now, would you please stop the work and call your artisans?”
Lennok nodded.
“It would be quicker to see all their faces at once and reach a conclusion.”
At his words, Cyberd immediately halted the workshop’s operations and gathered the other artisans before Lennok.
It was only natural that the artisans, who had been engrossed in their work and were now called away, would look displeased after their bewildered customers were excused.
Artisans of various ages, from young men to middle-aged ones, all stared at Lennok with identical looks of annoyance.
“So, you’re saying the culprit is among us?”
The oldest-looking artisan asked Lennok with a sneer.
Several other younger artisans also looked at Lennok, making no effort to hide their displeasure.
“Now that I see it, it’s that fool from the Selection Ceremony who recently got promoted to the Upper Workshop District.”
“It’s not enough that you borrow Master Narcissa Solmer’s name, now you’re trying to lay hands on our master’s workshop too?”
“This is absurd. This workshop is everything to me, how could you suspect us…”
Despite the chilling reactions from all sides, Lennok quietly raised a hand.
“Please, step forward and line up in front of me.”
“What?”
“To identify the culprit, I also need to be careful. I want to compare them under as identical conditions as possible.”
“…”
The artisans’ faces flared in indignation, but when Cyberd, standing behind Lennok, nodded, they grudgingly shut their mouths and lined up neatly.
Lennok slowly walked in front of the artisans, closing his eyes and nodding gently.
Far from scrutinizing the artisans, Lennok walked with his eyes closed, causing Cyberd and even Mouser to look perplexed.
Still with his eyes closed, Lennok circled them twice more before speaking.
“There’s no scent.”
“…What?”
As the others blinked, unable to understand the meaning of his words, Lennok opened his eyes, nodded, and turned his gaze.
“That’s enough. I think that will suffice.”
“Alright, can we get an explanation now?”
“As you can see, the five furnaces located in this workshop are spread across the walls, but the flow of their heat is shared through the workshop’s internal facilities.”
Lennok spoke in the now-silent workshop.
“It’s a structure where heat vents, organically connected to the five furnaces, circulate through the workshop’s ceiling, walls, and underground to regulate and manage the heat.”
“That’s right.”
“The problem is that because there are too many furnaces, the structure of the heat regulation passages is excessively complex.”
As Lennok spoke, he took a pen to paper near the workbench and began to draw naturally.
A bizarre shape, as if hundreds of spiderwebs stretched out from the massive workshop.
“To regulate the heat within the defined space, the vents were spread out to as many places as possible, making the structure itself intricately tangled.”
“Hmm…”
Cyberd, frowning, stared at the paper Lennok held out, and said,
“So this is my workshop? It seems you don’t have much talent for drawing.”
“…”
Lennok’s crude drawing skills couldn’t fully express it, but it was unavoidable as his priority was to make them understand the situation.
“That’s why it’s difficult to quantitatively measure the heat regulation values of each vent, and even if there’s a spike in readings, it’s hard to observe and pinpoint the problem.”
Lennok tapped the furnace wall and said,
“The culprit likely knew the internal environment of these furnaces well, and knew that even if the internal temperature of a furnace gradually rose due to an anomaly, the cause would not be easily found.”
“Something only possible if one knows the internal environment of the furnace well…”
Cyberd frowned, muttered, following Lennok’s words, then shook his head.
“No, if someone among my disciples had intentionally tried to ruin my workshop, there would have been far more effective methods. There’s no reason to bother with such a troublesome approach.”
Gradually raising the internal temperature of the furnace to spoil the quality of goods produced in the workshop was a serious issue, but there were countless other ways to immediately damage the revenue or business of this massive workshop.
Moreover, if the culprits were disciples who lived with Cyberd and knew the workshop’s internal facilities well, it would have been much easier to damage other facilities rather than the furnaces.
“In my workshop, these five furnaces are the most robust and frequently maintained core facilities. Even I couldn’t forcibly overload the furnaces without using internal system management privileges, and even then, it would take far longer than three days.”
As if he had already concluded that Lennok’s judgment was completely wrong, Cyberd sat directly opposite Lennok and began to explain rapidly.
“If, as you say, the disciples were the culprits, they would have tampered with the water supply system, the ventilation, or at the very least, removed the workshop’s foundation stones, instead of touching the furnaces.”
However, despite Cyberd’s words, Lennok simply nodded.
“That’s precisely what made it difficult to identify the cause of the problem.”
“What?”
“The culprit did not do this to ruin the workshop. They simply believed that if it served their purpose, damage to the workshop didn’t matter. These two things are very different.”
“…”
“The reason they specifically had to tamper with the furnace, rather than other workshop facilities, existed for that person.”
Did he mean it was merely a secondary consequence of another objective, not resentment towards Cyberd or an attempt to ruin the workshop?
As the others slowly pondered the meaning, Lennok pulled something from his pocket.
“Super-high temperature flames that can only be maintained in a workshop of this scale. Yet, a severe anomaly caused the temperature to rise even further. What do you think it means that the cause itself couldn’t be found anywhere else?”
“Oh, wait. Tampering with the furnace…!”
Whoosh!
Before the other artisans could stop him, Lennok abruptly threw something like powder into the fiercely burning furnace and smiled.
“It means that the cause of the problem itself existed within the furnace.”
“How dare an outsider touch the furnace flames…!”
A young disciple, enraged, burst up and charged at Lennok.
The artisan strode forward, extending a hand towards Lennok as if to grab him by the collar and throw him down.
Everyone’s eyes widened instantly at the sight, but Lennok merely looked at the young man with an indifferent expression.
Just as Cyberd was about to restrain the young man, whose murderous expression suggested he could easily throw Lennok into the furnace…
Whoosh!
The young man didn’t grab Lennok but simply brushed past him.
“…?”
His movement was so natural, it was as if his hostility towards Lennok moments ago had been a lie.
The moment the other disciples slightly parted their lips, unable to comprehend the young man’s actions, he suddenly accelerated and began to run frantically.
The disciples stood up abruptly, realizing his direction was straight into the flames of the furnace Lennok had just tampered with.
“B-Boyan!!”
“You lunatic, where are you going!!”
“Stop him, that bastard is determined to die…!”
Before the other disciples could follow and restrain the young man called Boyan, the flames erupting from inside the furnace engulfed him.
Crackle!
“Gah!”
“H-Hot…!”
The other disciples recoiled in horror, then turned to Cyberd with confused expressions.
“Master, why is Boyan…!”
“Wait.”
Cyberd said, watching the flames inside the furnace with a sharp gaze.
“It doesn’t seem to be over yet.”
At that moment, a middle-aged man with a bushy beard emerged from the flames, carrying the struggling young man over his shoulder.
Whoosh!
“Phew…! What a bother, really.”
Mouser, his bushy beard singed, grumbled, while Boyan, held over his shoulder, thrashed wildly.
“L-Let go of me!!!”
“No.”
Mouser replied, unceremoniously dropping Boyan onto the floor.
Thud!
“Gah!”
Boyan, sprawled from the impact, opened his eyes wide and barely managed to gasp for air.
He clutched his stomach, unable to get up, trembling.
He had surely trained for a long time as an artisan of Cyberd’s workshop, yet he seemed unable to withstand Mouser’s strength.
“…”
Cyberd quietly rose from his seat and silently watched Boyan.
Boyan couldn’t even meet his master’s gaze, let alone look him in the eye.
After watching Boyan for a long time, Cyberd let out a shaky sigh and turned his head.
“…I understand now who tampered with the furnace to raise its temperature.”
His gaze was directed at Lennok, who stood silently leaning against the furnace.
“So, explain everything now – why this happened.”
The other disciples, too, finally understood what Lennok had just done and held their breath in silence.
Lennok had succeeded in identifying the very culprit he spoke of, simply by throwing something unknown into the furnace.
He had even anticipated that his actions would force the culprit to move, and had Mouser waiting beforehand to rescue Boyan.
It was an impossible feat without understanding the entire situation and identifying the cause after just a brief look around the workshop.
By repeating a few seemingly meaningless actions that they thought were pointless, Lennok had truly proven his words.
“Of course. It seems I have some time before I can show you directly.”
Lennok pondered for a moment at Cyberd’s words, then nodded and stood up.
“From the moment I heard that the workshop’s temperature was rising, I didn’t consider any other cause besides the furnaces. This massive workshop simply has no other heat source that could gradually raise its temperature.”
Saying so, Lennok surveyed the surrounding workshop.
“Looking at the workshop now, there’s one furnace installed in each of the four walls, but uniquely, on the north-facing wall, two furnaces coexist on a single wall.”
“That’s…”
“If they had intended to install more furnaces, they would have extended the workshop’s walls or changed its structure during construction from the start. This is evidence that there was an urgent reason to add another furnace due to some circumstance.”
Lennok said,
“The reason the workshop’s temperature gradually decreased when there were four furnaces, but now, with five, it’s steadily rising. It would be strange if there wasn’t a secret hidden in that change.”
“…We were well aware of the change due to the number of furnaces.”
Cyberd replied.
“But even when we turned off one furnace and operated only four, the workshop’s internal temperature didn’t drop at all. That’s why we tried so hard to find the problem elsewhere in the workshop, not the furnaces…”
“As I told you before, the number of furnaces isn’t the problem. It was the change in time that occurred between the number of furnaces increasing from four to five. That difference was simply altering the workshop’s temperature.”
Lennok said, casually reaching his hand into the flames protruding from the furnace.
“That’s because, from the very beginning, it was impossible to observe the cause of the furnace’s internal temperature rising through physical means.”
“W-Wait…!”
“It’s about time it came out… Here it is.”
The moment Cyberd reached out in alarm at the sight of Lennok plunging his bare hand into the flames.
Swoosh!
Lennok boldly grabbed something from deep within the flames and pulled it out with a yank.
Splosh!
The long body, caught and dragged out from inside the furnace, thrashed in Lennok’s hand like a living fish.
Only then did the other artisans’ eyes widen, tearing, as they finally saw its form with their own eyes.
“T-That’s…!”
[Hiss, hiss, hiss!!!]
A scaled lizard flicked its tongue and thrashed its legs.
The scales covering its body were made of burning flames, and a faint, bright blue flame glowed at the tip of its tail.
Its essence was closer to a spirit and an attribute than a clearly defined physical form.
Cyberd, belatedly realizing the lizard’s true identity, muttered unconsciously,
“…A spirit.”
“That’s right.”
Lennok said, grabbing the lizard’s tail and lifting it high.
“A spirit born with the fire attribute. They say it’s born in strong flames and grows by feeding on heat and fire.”
“…”
“Especially spirits in the form of these lizards are said to be dull-sensed and voracious, sometimes devouring a considerable amount of food right where they sit.”
“I see. So that’s what it was…”
Cyberd, understanding the cause and motive of the entire situation, muttered blankly.
“Boyan became a spirit sorcerer.”
“Master…”
“Boyan probably obtained the spirit before the fifth furnace was built. But he wouldn’t have known how much food he’d need to control such a voracious spirit.”
Boyan looked at Cyberd weakly, but Lennok ignored Boyan’s gaze and continued.
“So, instead of abandoning this spirit he had painstakingly acquired, he decided to raise it secretly inside the workshop’s furnace.”
The lizard, which had been thrashing for a long time after being pulled from the flames, now hung limp, its tongue lolling out, as if all its strength had been drained.
“At first, it probably just hid in the furnace, gradually devouring the heat.”
Lennok said, watching the lizard with interest.
“But as time passed and its body grew, the spirit’s own power began to intensify, causing the furnace’s heat to rise along with it.”
“So that’s why the workshop’s temperature didn’t drop even after one furnace was shut down…”
When the fire spirit was young, it would have only consumed the surrounding heat, causing the furnace’s temperature to gradually decrease.
However, as the spirit gradually grew and gained strength, and began to emit more heat than it consumed, the furnace’s temperature started to rise in reverse.
Even with one of the five furnaces shut down, the spirit’s power alone would have been enough to keep the workshop’s temperature rising.
The other artisans also seemed to understand Lennok’s explanation immediately, their lips twitching with agitation.
“That’s impossible…”
“How could you possibly have thought that a spirit was the problem in this city?”
“From the moment I first heard the explanation, I didn’t think the number of furnaces was the issue.”
Lennok replied.
“If the temperature dropped at one point and then steadily rose afterward, I thought it was more akin to a living creature’s behavior, not the workshop’s…”
Lennok tossed the limp spirit in front of Boyan, who carefully picked up the lizard’s body and hugged it.
Lennok smiled, meeting Boyan’s hostile gaze.
“There aren’t many beings that can live, or rather must live, inside a furnace.”