Deciding that asking for forgiveness was better than permission was the right answer in Simon's book. While Ordanvale's headman disagreed with that approach, he agreed to forget about Simon's finds as long as he kept his operations quiet.

After that, thanks to his efforts to purge the local monsters for their life force as much as anything else, there was plenty of extra manpower available in the seasons between planting and harvest. Simon had no trouble at all finding men who were interested in making money, and he gathered half a dozen strong men with families with the promise of equal shares and paid for the smith to make the tools they'd need, along with a few donkeys to carry the weight.

After that, they got to work. One day, the seven of them just went up the mountain without telling anyone where they were going, and they didn't come back for two weeks. They brought back almost no ore with them that time, but they got a lot of work done besides.

They felled a hundred trees, built a small lodge, started a mine shaft deeper into the vein, and split timbers to shore it up as they went. More importantly, though, Simon started building a smelter out of mountain stone and waste rock, cemented together with mud.

One of the men asked why they didn't bring the ore back with them, but to Simon, the math was simple. "This ore is 90% worthless rock and 10% precious silver. Less, maybe. I don't know. Carrying it all the way back is a lot more work than just dumping the worthless part and turning it into ingots first."

Though he'd need to purchase or manufacture large bellows for the thing, it was doable, and as soon as he melted down a crucible of ore to make a few ounces of molten silver metal in the blacksmith's shop, he knew his plan would work.

Unfortunately Simon had only smelted gold before, and not everything he knew was applicable to silver, so he swore the smith to secrecy, and he joined them on their second trip to help set things properly in return for a small share of the profits. He helped Simon design the airflow, explained the importance of doing the whole thing on a bed of bone ash, and showed him how to bake the material first to release the sulfur before raising the temperature to release the metal from the rock matrix.

Even eight men, though, there was only so much they could get done. Once their smelting furnace was done, it ran almost continuously, and he devoted more men to gathering firewood than to mining ore after that. Even then, the ore was piling up faster than he could use it.

Simon could think of a hundred ways he could speed this up with magic, but he didn't wish to pay the cost or reveal that his knowledge extended to more than goblin slaying or prospecting. He'd let his legend build up organically off those ideas and didn't think he'd be able to squeeze warlock in there in any way that didn't get him lynched.

Still, he couldn't stop himself from thinking about the way he might use a word of fire to precisely heat the stuff. He might even be able to use the waste heat to power a secondary heat source to cut down on the firewood overall, but he'd have to rebuild the thing and put runes in the chimney.

Hell, I could probably use fire to power a word of earth to draw the metal out directly, he realized. It would be purer, too, but it would be obvious that there was magic involved.

He wasn't limited to using magic to enhance the smelter, either. Simon might not have the faintest idea of how gunpowder or dynamite was made, but he knew that blasting was the cornerstone of mining, and at the end of the day, all that was was force with a chemical source. He could do the same thing with magical force, and he strongly suspected he could fuel it with pieces of stranger's souls or even demonology. They were dangerous thoughts. It would take calibration, of course, but still, it felt like opening Pandora's box.

If I use force to build a mineshaft, then why not use it to undermine a castle wall or power a cannon? He asked himself as he worked.

Slowly but surely, Simon could see all of these inventions stretching into other inventions in a way that would surely lead to any number of terrible consequences.

The consequences that were almost as easy to see, though, were what all of this silver would do to the local economy. By the time they were getting ready to head back down the mountain the second time, they'd be doing it with ten pounds of ingots and a plan. Simon wanted to build a gravity mint, like the one he'd built before in Schwarzenbruck. Well, the one I will build there in a few years, he told himself, mentally correcting his own convoluted timeline.

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This time, though, instead of minting a new local currency, he'd decided to counterfeit Brinnish coins. After all, as he'd explained to his crew, "Having a bunch of silver we shouldn't is mysterious enough, but having it in raw form is just begging for the tax man to ask all of the unwanted questions."

Really, replicating the dies to fabricate coinage wouldn't be hard. The hardest part would be convincing himself not to pretty them up as he did so. The kingdom's silver was functional but ugly as sin. One side was a sword and crown, and the back was an unfortunate-looking portrait of one of the recent kings. They were crude things, and he would have done much better if he could.

Still, even though all these steps were taking time, and the only ones that were getting paid were the merchants he was buying supplies from, there were no complaints. Then, men could see the silver, and they knew they would be paid out soon with more than any of them expected to get from their harvests.

By the time summer had arrived in all its glory, They had two men at the mine at all times, feeding the smelter and turning rocks into lumps of metal that then were pounded flat into counterfeit coins. Their labor force had expanded, too, mostly because people couldn't keep their mouths shut. What had started as seven men and a complicit smith had blossomed into twenty.

That was when Simon put his foot down. Until that point, they could always use another good set of hands, but eventually, even running their smelter twenty-four hours a day, they always had more ore than they knew what to do with.

That was when they were attacked for the first time by goatmen. He lost a lot of workers after that, not to the violence but to fear. Only the man working the smelter had been seriously hurt after that, and with a little surreptitious magic, Simon dragged him back from death's door and had mostly returned him to health again after only a few days of convalescence.

After that, he left his men to run the mine and his furnaces, and he set off into the wilds to hunt the hoofed bastards before they hurt anyone else. With the help of his divining rod, this actually wasn't very hard. He'd never tried to locate a living thing with it, but it worked surprisingly well at it, and as a result, he spent those first beautiful weeks of summer hiking to the top of snow-covered peaks and burning their primitive villages to the ground.

Simon killed four tribes of the monsters, and though he was able to harvest so much life force that he actually swapped out his gem for one of his rubies lest he overfill it, he didn't find any of them to be a challenge. Even eight-foot-tall beasts with horns as long as his arm weren't too challenging when he could fling them off the mountain cliffs with magic whenever they outnumbered him.

Simon tried to avoid using magic. What he really wanted to do was go back to not using it at all to see if he could regain that clarity he'd been missing for so long. With magical creations powered by gemstones, that seemed entirely possible, but life kept getting in the way, and if a big hairy asshole was swinging a tree trunk at him as a club, he'd rather speak a word and end it than get his skull cracked.

When Simon returned, he gave his men a sanitized version of the highlights, but even those they found impressive. Still, it was always something, though, and despite the relative peace after they returned to the steady rhythm of mining ore and pounding coins, the next complication turned out to be theft.

Not of silver ingots or even coins, but ore. It was a stupid thing to steal since the only man in the region who could melt it for them was on Simon's payroll, but people still tried it anyway, which earned them a beat down for their troubles.

Simon didn't like the idea of punishing them like that, but he liked the idea of what would happen to their little operation once the word reached the wrong ears, even worse.

"These are the men you've stolen from," Simon would say as his wayward workman begged for mercy. "Ask them, not me."

No one ever died from those punishments, but all three men who tried to steal from his little mine ended up black and blue. They were kicked off of work that touched silver in any way, and their share of the spoils was cut in half as they hauled lumber and stood watch. Even so, none of them quit. The money was too good, and half a payday was better than none.

Simon would have preferred to remove them from his little operation entirely, but he had no doubt that as soon as anyone no longer had their fortunes tied to its secrecy and success, they'd tell the whole world. So, since he didn't want to kill them or murder the Earl's men if he didn't have to, he kept everyone's incentives aligned.

"This is the way we individually get rich," he said often enough when he paid people out their share for the month and made them sign for it in his ledger. "But it's also the way that we make Ordanvale better."

It was easy to see the way the town was benefiting from this illicit income stream in a thousand little ways, but mostly in the quality of cloth and food that was being imported. When Simon arrived in the small herding community half a year ago, they were a simple place beset by goblins.

Now, not only was that hazard erased, but new funds were flowing in from his illicit source, and everyone was benefiting. More colorful fabrics and higher-quality foods were imported from other nearby communities. As the residents' diets improved, so did their health. Simon hadn't intended to set roots down here, but each time he returned to Ordanvale, he found it to be a little bit nicer of a place, and it was hard to complain about that, and he built his wealth and planned new experiments.

Unfortunately, the heat slowed down work after that, but even so, Simon was satisfied with the progress. He even paid other men in town to start work on a new home for him, a little further from the town proper. This one would have a basement and space for a workshop. More importantly, though, it would have privacy, and if he made any terrible mistakes while he was experimenting, he would only kill himself instead of his neighbors.

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