Blacksmith vs. the System-Chapter 207

“It was too much to hope for, right?” I muttered as I looked at the pile of swords in front of me, each representing a different mixture of dungeon material and Wisdom-forging.

None of them came close to being satisfactory. No matter how much I pulled, neither decay nor flame material came close to supporting Radiant Flame efficiently.

“Maybe it would have been better if I failed spectacularly,” I said as I examined the results of my tinkering, enhancing the method of ‘stretching’ the concept until the outline roughly fit Radiant Flame, but was too weak to support its conceptual weight.

Had I failed spectacularly, I could have stopped the experiment and focused on forging them directly. Unfortunately, I was in limbo, with a decision to make.

Focus on forging the orthodox way provided by the skill, or continue with another experiment.

Working under a strict time limit was never fun, especially with a potential result dangling in front of me. I believed that I could once again hack the skill properly, if only I had merely a month during which I was allowed to work without interruptions.

“Unfortunately, at this point, it’s no different than a hopeless, fanciful dream,” I said. Somehow, I had managed to make enough enemies to turn the idea of a break into an impossibility, which once again forced me to consider alternative paths.

The paths that I would have angrily refused if Terry or another of my students came to ask for my permission to pursue, claiming that it was too risky.

”It should be enough to keep me alive, right?” I muttered as I summoned a particular part of my status screen, feeling tense.

[Health 4380/4380]

The source of my tenseness had to do with the nature of flame and decay I had been working on. Solitarily, stretching them to approximate Radiant Flame had been a wasteful effort, but only because they were coming from different directions. While Radiant Flame was not something that was at the axis of the two concepts, it was still close enough that mixing the two had a promising potential. The fire carried certain wild energy, while decay could be approximated until it reflected the piercing concept buried in the skill somewhat.

Or, so I hoped. Playing with the concepts … or the Quintessence, as my skills liked to call them, was not an exact science.

At least, not yet. Maybe it would change in the future once I could identify the working principles, just like the progress I had made with shape manipulation.

“Let’s begin with something simple,” I said as I used some ground-up, weakened material, mixing them together before I used my mana to melt it together inside a metal box, similar to how I did with singular materials under the guidance of my skill.

The results were … not what I had hoped for.

“At least I found a decent way to make explosions,” I said, but a few more attempts in the box showed that even that was not the case. The explosion was intense, but not predictable, neither in terms of timing nor impact.

An unstable weapon was a terrible weapon.

Still, that didn’t prevent me from running a hundred different experiments in quick succession, taking note of the observations to get a hint of a pattern.

There was none that I could detect. And, even if there were any, it clearly required a much more elaborate setup than what I was utilizing.

“It’s a tricky situation,” I said as I closed my eyes, reviewing the details of the experiment in my mind, and searching for patterns. Then, I opened my eyes to plot some of the variables on paper.

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Even with near-perfect recall, working on paper helped. Sometimes, it was easier to see the relationships between different variables once they were plotted appropriately. Once I finished drawing something around fifty different graphs, I tapped the pile of paper.

“The problem is with the fire part,” I said, which had been supported by not only the amount of lizard parts I had introduced, but also the plotting pattern. It was not a shocking revelation, as my relative expertise on decay was obvious, but every data point counted.

“It looks like I’m doing it,” I said as I moved away from the workbench with a beast claw in hand, and sat down. I was reasonably confident that I wouldn’t hurt myself too much, but that didn’t change the fact that the last time I poked around this blindly, I almost killed myself.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and imagined a singular flame with the exclusion of everything else … which was something I achieved surprisingly smoothly. I always had problems focusing, with my thoughts running in the background.

Maybe it was the benefit of Wisdom, or a side benefit of the Meditation skill, but I was able to achieve an uninterrupted focus. I let myself submerge into that small, flickering flame, solidifying the image before reaching inward —

And spat out blood, one that smelled suspiciously charred.

[-281 Health]

“Well, the damage is not as bad as I had feared,” I muttered. Merely less than a tenth, nowhere near killing myself. This meant, officially, the experiment was less suicidal than the idea of facing the combined might of two cities at war.

Though, it still hurt horribly.

“It’s like saying swimming with sharks without a cage is safer than skydiving without a parachute,” I mocked myself and bit into a nutrient bar, waiting for my Health to recover before I repeated the experiment.

[-195 Health]

“This time, it hurt less,” I said, before I started a pattern of spitting out blood and eating as I tried to figure out the flame equivalent of meditation. With Wisdom there to help me keep track, I could confidently say that it would take less than a hundred tries.

Merely eighty-seven painful attempts later, I was able to maintain a constant image of the flame in my mind and use it to draw mana toward me. The speed at which I was able to do so was slow, even weaker than my common Meditation skill back when I had first upgraded my class.

But, I didn’t care about such trivial details. The aim wasn’t to create an alternative method that could somehow rival a Mythic skill directly, but to deepen my understanding of fire.

Once I was confident that I wouldn’t kill myself at the smallest mistake, I started to imagine a bigger fire. A forge, one that was hot enough to melt iron, putting the weight of my Wisdom behind it. With that, the speed of absorption increased significantly, with no accidents.

More importantly, it felt more natural. “Could it be about my class,” I muttered. It was something I didn’t think about when I had started my experiments, but it made sense. The classes came with a lot of subliminal social context … maybe Blacksmith classes also came with the idea of a forge.

“If true, this has some incredible implications,” I said while I thought about the team of Blacksmiths that worked for me. None of them were able to upgrade their skills above Uncommon. But, if what I was experiencing wasn’t exclusive to the Smith of Decay class — which might as well be — that promised an alternative path.

“And, it might help the Farmers as well,” I said. If that could be used to improve their Common Meditation skill safely.

“Too bad I can’t use the image of a forge for my real experiment,” I said, as everything until now was just a way to confirm the viability of my path.

It was inevitable. While I thought of the concept behind the lizard’s flame to be just like ordinary flame, it was anything but that. The impact was the same, but not the root. It was more similar to the heat of bubbling lava, restless and violent rather than a controlled fire.

One that I understood only on the surface, which affected my attempts to manipulate and transform it.

I touched the claw, using my Observe to get a better sense of the flame concept hidden behind the claw. I had used Observe on the claws many times, but this time, assisted by my somewhat successful attempts to create my own flame-based meditation, I could see the difference.

Yes, the flame hidden in the claws was wild and uncontrolled, but it was not purely a destructive force … just like how the ocean waves were not destructive to the fish. It fueled the life of the lizards, fed them, and strengthened them.

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Just like the link between the insects and decay, the link was a fundamental part of their very being. I touched many other claws, their varying strengths giving me a stronger impression, until the image in my head was clear.

I closed my eyes once again, imagining a flat rock, one with a thin, growing crack, slowly revealing a thin line of lava, bubbling with energy. Slowly, mana started to drift toward me —

[-940 Health]

“Damn, that hurt,” I gasped the moment my control slipped, the concept far more violent than the earlier flame.

Still, despite the pain, I was confident that I was on the right path.

Once again, I created the image in my mind.

[-750 Health]